DOCSLIB.ORG

Cheap Imitation and Song Books Through the Sketches

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Cheap Imitation and Song Books Through the Sketches Cage's Imitation Game: Cheap Imitation and Song Books through the sketches Jeffrey Perry NOTE: The examples for the (text-only) PDF version of this item are available online at: https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.3/mto.21.27.3.perry.php KEYWORDS: John Cage, Henry David Thoreau, Erik Satie, Cheap Imitation, Song Books, chance, indeterminacy, I Ching, Socrate, Messe des Pauvres ABSTRACT: The theme of John Cage’s Song Books (1970), according to Cage, is contained in the statement “We connect Satie with Thoreau” (Cage 1970a, 1). Previous studies of Cage’s Song Books have not asked what I feel to be obvious questions: how, precisely, does Cage connect Satie with Thoreau? To what end? And how does Cage connect to Satie and Thoreau (and to the other sources from which he borrows)? I make use of Cage’s sketch materials to seek answers. I examine three of the Solos for Voice from Song Books that make use of the cheap-imitation procedure that Cage had devised for his work of that name in 1969. Because Song Books is a work for vocalists while Cheap Imitation is a work for solo piano, Cage needed to apply analogous processes of textual “imitation” and mixture to the words of Thoreau to accompany the cheap imitations of the music of Satie. This article explores the persistence of compositional choice in Song Books as revealed by the sketches, in so doing exploring themes of duality in Cage’s pursuit of “poetry as I need it” in the music of Erik Satie, the words of Henry David Thoreau, and in the imitation game that he devises to connect them with one another. DOI: 10.30535/mto.27.3.0 Received October 2020 Volume 27, Number 3, July 2021 Copyright © 2021 Society for Music Theory 1. Introduction: Song Books, Satie, Thoreau, and the “Cheap Imitation” Solos for Voice [1.1] According to John Cage, the theme of his Song Books (1970) is contained in the statement “We connect Satie with Thoreau” (Cage 1970a, 1). While Song Books has been the subject of numerous studies, many of which I cite below, fundamental questions remain: how, precisely, does Cage’s Song Books connect Satie with Thoreau, and to what end? Moreover, what role does Cage, the person and composer, play in connecting Satie, Thoreau, and the other sources from which he borrows? I make use of Cage’s sketch materials to seek answers.(1) [1.2] Cheap-imitation procedure is one of several compositional techniques that Cage recycles from previous works in Song Books. Cage devised this procedure for his work Cheap Imitation (1969). Cheap-imitation (as I will call it henceforth, with hyphen, to distinguish it from the eponymous work in which it first appears) requires that Cage engage painstakingly and note-by-note with his sources, and thus is the ideal locus for a study of how he understands the connection he makes between French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925) and American naturalist, author, and activist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). [1.3] Mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian and soprano Simone Rist commissioned Song Books through the Gulbenkian Foundation sometime in 1970 for an October 26 premiere (Cage 1970a, i–ii). The I Ching determined that there would be an “astonishing number” of solos to compose before the premiere date; starting work in August, Cage composed all ninety of them using a three-part process (Brooks 1982, 87).(2) First, Cage consulted the I Ching to determine the genre of each solo (song, theater, song with electronics, or theater with electronics). Second, he allowed the I Ching to determine whether or not each solo was relevant or irrelevant to the overall theme—i.e., whether or not it was connected with Satie and/or Thoreau. Finally, the I Ching told Cage whether he should employ a previously developed compositional technique for the solo or create a new one.(3) The cheap-imitation solos listed in Example 1 clearly fall into the former category (Solo 85, not strictly a cheap-imitation, is listed because it employs a similar, but newly-derived technique, that of “rubbing” a Satie score to create a new score). All are songs (i.e., not theater pieces), four with electronics and three without.(4) Five of the seven solos are relevant to the Satie-with-Thoreau theme, the other two irrelevant. In practice, “relevant” here means that the solo borrows either Thoreau’s words— manipulated as listed in the rightmost column of the example, under “Text Granularity”—or Satie’s music, subjected to the cheap-imitation procedure he had devised in the previous year. Solos 27, 30, 34 and 85 draw on both sources; solos 18 and 25 draw on Satie without Thoreau. The two irrelevant solos (39, 47) are cheap imitations on Schubert’s “Die Hoffnung,” with a text by Schiller, and the aria “Der hölle Rache” from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Schikaneder’s original text replaced with syllables from the “Thunderclaps,” onomatopoeic nonsense words found throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.(5) [1.4] Drawing on Cage’s sketches, a 1982 essay by William Brooks provides an account of the creation of Song Books and a brief analysis of the first twenty of the ninety solos (Brooks 1982, 87-95).(6) He explores in some detail how Cage used the I Ching to compose Song Books and other works, and the system that Cage devised to balance subjectivity and chance-derivation (Brooks 1982, 99, fn. 7). The questions that Cage framed for the oracle gave him the option to recycle techniques or even entire pieces; several of the solos are essentially repetitions of one another, or reprints of earlier Cage pieces. Brooks notes that “the solos in the Song Books, while extraordinarily diverse, are intimately interlinked both to each other and to earlier pieces.” (Brooks 1982, 92; see also fn. 8). As he observes, “despite the sophisticated use of chance techniques, Cage’s own taste played a significant part in shaping the Song Books” and astutely remarks that chance procedures “are only one tool among many that Cage has used to pursue quite consistently a single goal throughout his career: the disciplined acceptance . of that which had been previously rejected out-of-hand” (Brooks 1982, 95). [1.5] David W. Bernstein provides further insight with his detailed explanation of Cage’s application of “cheap imitation” to the work of the same name, and offers an insightful discussion of the interaction of compositional choice and chance in that work as well as a study of Cage’s borrowing from other composers. He also catalogs the Song Book solos that use cheap-imitation procedures and mentions subsequent works that use similar modeling techniques (Bernstein 2001a). His work on the sketches of Music of Changes (2001a) and other works (2001b), furthermore, provides an invaluable guide for sketch study of Cage’s music. [1.6] Ryan Dohoney (2014) provides a complementary perspective, examining the manner in which Julius Eastman pushed against the implicit boundaries that Cage had established for performances of Song Books and other works and demonstrating that his preferences and aversions still lurk behind the systems and structures he erects to rid his music of them. These insights afford us the opportunity to inquire further into Cage’s motives in making the choices he did within the compositional meta-system that is Song Books. [1.7] By 1970 Cage had played and studied Satie’s music for several decades. His idiosyncratic understanding of how Satie’s music moved through time was central to his compositional practice and his understanding of rhythmic structure (Nyman 1973, Perry 2014). During the summer of 1948 he delivered the lecture “Defense of Satie” at Black Mountain College during a series of concerts that consisted primarily of him playing Satie’s works on piano (Cage 1970a, 77-84). That fall, in a letter to the critic Peter Yates, Cage notes, “I give [Satie] first place with Webern and I fight for them both . When you ask for a list of his major works, I am baffled and would find it much easier to list his inconsequential works, for they are few in number.”(7) He nonetheless provides an extensive list of the Satie works that he finds valuable; these include the Messe des pauvres (1895), a work that Cage was to draw on, as we shall see, in Song Books, as well as the fourth of the Cinq Grimaces (1913), which Cage claims as the locus classicus of his own square root (micro-macrocosmic) structural technique (Perry 2014, 486; see also Cage 1983, 126). During a 1949 visit to Paris, Cage had attempted to persuade a skeptical Darius Milhaud that a list of numbers left behind by Satie represented a carefully devised scheme of rhythmic proportions like the ones that Cage himself had been using for a decade. (Cage 2003, 50-51).(8) In 1963 Cage instigated the marathon premiere of Satie’s hours-long Vexations. His involvement with Satie’s music continued virtually to his death, ending with the 1992 collaborative multimedia work The First Meeting of the Satie Society. [1.8] Still earlier, Virgil Thomson had introduced Cage to Erik Satie’s 1918 symphonic drama Socrate. At a gathering in New Jersey in early July 1944, the younger composer accompanied the elder at the piano as they read through the work, an event that was to prove of seismic importance to Cage, who reported that “we must have played and sung it six times” (Cage 2016, 66). Satie’s drame symphonique held a unique place in Cage’s heart and thought forever after.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Musico-Poetic Form in Satie's "Humoristic" Piano Suites (1913-14) Alan M
    Document généré le 30 sept. 2021 08:51 Canadian University Music Review Revue de musique des universités canadiennes Musico-poetic Form in Satie's "Humoristic" Piano Suites (1913-14) Alan M. Gillmor Numéro 8, 1987 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1014932ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1014932ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique des universités canadiennes ISSN 0710-0353 (imprimé) 2291-2436 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Gillmor, A. M. (1987). Musico-poetic Form in Satie's "Humoristic" Piano Suites (1913-14). Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, (8), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.7202/1014932ar All Rights Reserved © Canadian University Music Society / Société de musique Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des des universités canadiennes, 1986 services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ MUSICO-POETIC FORM IN SATIE'S "HUMORISTIC" PIANO SUITES (1913-14) Alan M. Gillmor Erik Satie has become an almost iconic figure in the jagged landscape of contemporary musical aesthetics. His anti-Romantic rejection of the sublime, his glorification of the homely and the commonplace, his highly refined sense of the absurd and the whimsical are the primary qualities that have endeared him to the more iconoclastic members of the critical fraternity.
    [Show full text]
  • Statement on Intermedia
    the Collaborative Reader: Part 3 Statement on Intermedia Dick Higgins Synaesthesia and Intersenses Dick Higgins Paragraphs on Conceptual Art/ Sentences on Conceptual Art Sol Lewitt The Serial Attitude Mel Bochner The Serial Attitude – Mel Bochner Tim Rupert Introduction to the Music of John Cage James Pritchett In the Logician's Voice David Berlinski But Is It Composing? Randall Neal The Database As a Genre of New Media Lev Manovich STATEMENT ON INTERMEDIA Art is one of the ways that people communicate. It is difficult for me to imagine a serious person attacking any means of communication per se. Our real enemies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the present situation. When these are attacked, a diversion has been established which only serves the interests of our real enemies. However, due to the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio, our sensitivities have changed. The very complexity of this impact gives us a taste for simplicity, for an art which is based on the underlying images that an artist has always used to make his point. As with the cubists, we are asking for a new way of looking at things, but more totally, since we are more impatient and more anxious to go to the basic images. This explains the impact of Happenings, event pieces, mixed media films. We do not ask any more to speak magnificently of taking arms against a sea of troubles, we want to see it done.
    [Show full text]
  • Against Expression?: Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Satie's" Parade"
    Against Expression?: Avant-garde Aesthetics in Satie’s Parade A thesis submitted to the Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF MUSIC In the division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music 2020 By Carissa Pitkin Cox 1705 Manchester Street Richland, WA 99352 [email protected] B.A. Whitman College, 2005 M.M. The Boston Conservatory, 2007 Committee Chair: Dr. Jonathan Kregor, Ph.D. Abstract The 1918 ballet, Parade, and its music by Erik Satie is a fascinating, and historically significant example of the avant-garde, yet it has not received full attention in the field of musicology. This thesis will provide a study of Parade and the avant-garde, and specifically discuss the ways in which the avant-garde creates a dialectic between the expressiveness of the artwork and the listener’s emotional response. Because it explores the traditional boundaries of art, the avant-garde often resides outside the normal vein of aesthetic theoretical inquiry. However, expression theories can be effectively used to elucidate the aesthetics at play in Parade as well as the implications for expressability present in this avant-garde work. The expression theory of Jenefer Robinson allows for the distinction between expression and evocation (emotions evoked in the listener), and between the composer’s aesthetical goal and the listener’s reaction to an artwork. This has an ideal application in avant-garde works, because it is here that these two categories manifest themselves as so grossly disparate.
    [Show full text]
  • Perry Smt 2019 Handout
    Sketching and Imitating: Cage, Satie, Thoreau, and the Song Books Jeff Perry ([email protected]) Society for Music Theory • Columbus, OH • November 10, 2019 Some examples from my talk aren’t reproduced here, since they include images that belong to the John Cage Trust or NYPL Special Collections. Example 1. Socrate is an incredibly beautiful work. There is no expression in the music or in the words, and the result is that it is overpoweringly expressive. The melody is simply an atmosphere which floats. The accompaniment is a continuous juxtaposition of square simplicities. But the combination is of such grace! --JC to Merce Cunningham, 1944 (Kuhn 2016, 66) With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like that of body and soul. Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to clarity, and like the air. Grace is… the play with and against the clarity of the rhythmic structure. The two are always present together in the best works of the time arts, endlessly, and life-givingly, opposed to each other. --JC, 1944 (Silence, 91-92) Example 2. I am getting more and more involved with thoughts about society—the situation is so depraved. Have been reading Thoreau —Civil Disobedience. Getting his Journals, the new 2-vol. set. I want somehow to examine the situation, the social one, as we did the musical one, to change it or change “my” part of it so that I can “listen” to my “life” without self-consciousness, i.e., moral embarrassment.
    [Show full text]
  • Sounding Nostalgia in Post-World War I Paris
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Sounding Nostalgia In Post-World War I Paris Tristan Paré-Morin University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Recommended Citation Paré-Morin, Tristan, "Sounding Nostalgia In Post-World War I Paris" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3399. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3399 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3399 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sounding Nostalgia In Post-World War I Paris Abstract In the years that immediately followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Paris was at a turning point in its history: the aftermath of the Great War overlapped with the early stages of what is commonly perceived as a decade of rejuvenation. This transitional period was marked by tension between the preservation (and reconstruction) of a certain prewar heritage and the negation of that heritage through a series of social and cultural innovations. In this dissertation, I examine the intricate role that nostalgia played across various conflicting experiences of sound and music in the cultural institutions and popular media of the city of Paris during that transition to peace, around 1919-1920. I show how artists understood nostalgia as an affective concept and how they employed it as a creative resource that served multiple personal, social, cultural, and national functions. Rather than using the term “nostalgia” as a mere diagnosis of temporal longing, I revert to the capricious definitions of the early twentieth century in order to propose a notion of nostalgia as a set of interconnected forms of longing.
    [Show full text]
  • Paris, 1918-45
    un :al Chapter II a nd or Paris , 1918-45 ,-e ed MARK D EVOTO l.S. as es. 21 March 1918 was the first day of spring. T o celebrate it, the German he army, hoping to break a stalemate that had lasted more than three tat years, attacked along the western front in Flanders, pushing back the nv allied armies within a few days to a point where Paris was within reach an oflong-range cannon. When Claude Debussy, who died on 25 M arch, was buried three days later in the Pere-Laehaise Cemetery in Paris, nobody lingered for eulogies. The critic Louis Laloy wrote some years later: B. Th<' sky was overcast. There was a rumbling in the distance. \Vas it a storm, the explosion of a shell, or the guns atrhe front? Along the wide avenues the only traffic consisted of militarr trucks; people on the pavements pressed ahead hurriedly ... The shopkeepers questioned each other at their doors and glanced at the streamers on the wreaths. 'II parait que c'ctait un musicicn,' they said. 1 Fortified by the surrender of the Russians on the eastern front, the spring offensive of 1918 in France was the last and most desperate gamble of the German empire-and it almost succeeded. But its failure was decisive by late summer, and the greatest war in history was over by November, leaving in its wake a continent transformed by social lb\ convulsion, economic ruin and a devastation of human spirit. The four-year struggle had exhausted not only armies but whole civiliza­ tions.
    [Show full text]
  • The William Paterson University Department of Music Presents New
    The William Paterson University Department of Music presents New Music Series Peter Jarvis, director Featuring the Velez / Jarvis Duo, Judith Bettina & James Goldsworthy, Daniel Lippel and the William Paterson University Percussion Ensemble Monday, October 17, 2016, 7:00 PM Shea Center for the Performing Arts Program Mundus Canis (1997) George Crumb Five Humoresques for Guitar and Percussion 1. “Tammy” 2. “Fritzi” 3. “Heidel” 4. “Emma‐Jean” 5. “Yoda” Phonemena (1975) Milton Babbitt For Voice and Electronics Judith Bettina, voice Phonemena (1969) Milton Babbitt For Voice and Piano Judith Bettina, voice James Goldsworthy, Piano Penance Creek (2016) * Glen Velez For Frame Drums and Drum Set Glen Velez – Frame Drums Peter Jarvis – Drum Set Themes and Improvisations Peter Jarvis For open Ensemble Glen Velez & Peter Jarvis Controlled Improvisation Number 4, Opus 48 (2016) * Peter Jarvis For Frame Drums and Drum Set Glen Velez – Frame Drums Peter Jarvis – Drum Set Aria (1958) John Cage For a Voice of any Range Judith Bettina May Rain (1941) Lou Harrison For Soprano, Piano and Tam‐tam Elsa Gidlow Judith Bettina, James Goldsworthy, Peter Jarvis Ostinato Mezzo Forte, Opus 51 (2016) * Peter Jarvis For Percussion Band Evan Chertok, David Endean, Greg Fredric, Jesse Gerbasi Daniel Lucci, Elise Macloon Sean Dello Monaco – Drum Set * = World Premiere Program Notes Mundus Canis: George Crumb George Crumb’s Mundus Canis came about in 1997 when he wanted to write a solo guitar piece for his friend David Starobin that would be a musical homage to the lineage of Crumb family dogs. He explains, “It occurred to me that the feline species has been disproportionately memorialized in music and I wanted to help redress the balance.” Crumb calls the work “a suite of five canis humoresques” with a character study of each dog implied through the music.
    [Show full text]
  • Sonification As a Means to Generative Music Ian Baxter
    Sonification as a means to generative music By: Ian Baxter A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts & Humanities Department of Music January 2020 Abstract This thesis examines the use of sonification (the transformation of non-musical data into sound) as a means of creating generative music (algorithmic music which is evolving in real time and is of potentially infinite length). It consists of a portfolio of ten works where the possibilities of sonification as a strategy for creating generative works is examined. As well as exploring the viability of sonification as a compositional strategy toward infinite work, each work in the portfolio aims to explore the notion of how artistic coherency between data and resulting sound is achieved – rejecting the notion that sonification for artistic means leads to the arbitrary linking of data and sound. In the accompanying written commentary the definitions of sonification and generative music are considered, as both are somewhat contested terms requiring operationalisation to correctly contextualise my own work. Having arrived at these definitions each work in the portfolio is documented. For each work, the genesis of the work is considered, the technical composition and operation of the piece (a series of tutorial videos showing each work in operation supplements this section) and finally its position in the portfolio as a whole and relation to the research question is evaluated. The body of work is considered as a whole in relation to the notion of artistic coherency. This is separated into two main themes: the relationship between the underlying nature of the data and the compositional scheme and the coherency between the data and the soundworld generated by each piece.
    [Show full text]
  • 4' 33'': John Cage's Utopia of Music
    STUDIA HUMANISTYCZNE AGH Tom 15/2 • 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.7494/human.2016.15.2.17 Michał Palmowski* Jagiellonian University in Krakow 4’ 33’’: JOHN CAGE’S UTOPIA OF MUSIC The present article examines the connection between Cage’s politics and aesthetics, demonstrating how his formal experiments are informed by his political and social views. In 4’33’’, which is probably the best il- lustration of Cage’s radical aesthetics, Cage wanted his listeners to appreciate the beauty of accidental noises, which, as he claims elsewhere, “had been dis-criminated against” (Cage 1961d: 109). His egalitarian stance is also refl ected in his views on the function of the listener. He wants to empower his listeners, thus blurring the distinction between the performer and the audience. In 4’33’’ the composer forbidding the performer to impose any sounds on the audience gives the audience the freedom to rediscover the natural music of the world. I am arguing that in his experiments Cage was motivated not by the desire for formal novelty but by the utopian desire to make the world a better place to live. He described his music as “an affi rmation of life – not an at- tempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage 1961b: 12). Keywords: John Cage, utopia, poethics, silence, noise The present article is a discussion of the ideas informing the radical aesthetics of John Cage’s musical compositions.
    [Show full text]
  • John Cage's Entanglement with the Ideas Of
    JOHN CAGE’S ENTANGLEMENT WITH THE IDEAS OF COOMARASWAMY Edward James Crooks PhD University of York Music July 2011 John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy by Edward Crooks Abstract The American composer John Cage was famous for the expansiveness of his thought. In particular, his borrowings from ‘Oriental philosophy’ have directed the critical and popular reception of his works. But what is the reality of such claims? In the twenty years since his death, Cage scholars have started to discover the significant gap between Cage’s presentation of theories he claimed he borrowed from India, China, and Japan, and the presentation of the same theories in the sources he referenced. The present study delves into the circumstances and contexts of Cage’s Asian influences, specifically as related to Cage’s borrowings from the British-Ceylonese art historian and metaphysician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. In addition, Cage’s friendship with the Jungian mythologist Joseph Campbell is detailed, as are Cage’s borrowings from the theories of Jung. Particular attention is paid to the conservative ideology integral to the theories of all three thinkers. After a new analysis of the life and work of Coomaraswamy, the investigation focuses on the metaphysics of Coomaraswamy’s philosophy of art. The phrase ‘art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation’ opens the doors to a wide- ranging exploration of the mimesis of intelligible and sensible forms. Comparing Coomaraswamy’s ‘Traditional’ idealism to Cage’s radical epistemological realism demonstrates the extent of the lack of congruity between the two thinkers. In a second chapter on Coomaraswamy, the extent of the differences between Cage and Coomaraswamy are revealed through investigating their differing approaches to rasa , the Renaissance, tradition, ‘art and life’, and museums.
    [Show full text]
  • Liner Notes, Visit Our Web Site
    “Music of Our Time” When I worked at Columbia Records during the second half of the 1960s, the company was run in an enlightened way by its imaginative president, Goddard Lieberson. Himself a composer and a friend to many writers, artists, and musicians, Lieberson believed that a major record company should devote some of its resources to projects that had cultural value even if they didn’t bring in big profits from the marketplace. During those years American society was in crisis and the Vietnam War was raging; musical tastes were changing fast. It was clear to executives who ran record companies that new “hits” appealing to young people were liable to break out from unknown sources—but no one knew in advance what they would be or where they would come from. Columbia, successful and prosperous, was making plenty of money thanks to its Broadway musical and popular music albums. Classical music sold pretty well also. The company could afford to take chances. In that environment, thanks to Lieberson and Masterworks chief John McClure, I was allowed to produce a few recordings of new works that were off the beaten track. John McClure and I came up with the phrase, “Music of Our Time.” The budgets had to be kept small, but that was not a great obstacle because the artists whom I knew and whose work I wanted to produce were used to operating with little money. We wanted to produce the best and most strongly innovative new work that we could find out about. Innovation in those days had partly to do with creative uses of electronics, which had recently begun changing music in ways that would have been unimaginable earlier, and partly with a questioning of basic assumptions.
    [Show full text]
  • SATIE Gymnopédies
    1000 YEARS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC SATIE Gymnopédies VOLUME 74 | THE MODERN ERA FAST FACTS • Erik Satie is famous for his deeply eccentric nature, which extended to his dress (at one point he bought seven identical velvet suits and then, for more than ten years, wore nothing else), his eating habits (he claimed to eat only white food: ‘eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, SATIE chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white Gymnopédies varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish, without their skin’), and the instructions he gave to those performing his music: his scores are full of enigmatic notes such as ‘Light as an egg’, ‘Open your head’, ERIK SATIE 1866–1925 ‘Work it out yourself’ and ‘Don’t eat too much’. Trois Gymnopédies [9’44] 1 No. 1: Lent et douloureux (Slow and full of suffering) 3’37 • His sharp wit, irreverence and refusal to do as expected led him to reject the big, lush Romantic 2 No. 2: Lent et triste (Slow and sad) 3’06 tradition of composers like Wagner, and turn instead to shorter, simpler pieces in which melody was 3 No. 3: Lent et grave (Slow and solemn) 2’54 the central element. 4 Je te veux (I Want You) 5’17 • Satie broke new ground in many different musical ways. His familiarity with the world of cabaret (he [7’16] Trois Gnossiennes supported himself for several years by working as a pianist at Le Chat Noir and other Montmartre 5 No.
    [Show full text]